We live in strange times. Yesterday, as Zerlina has discussed, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And while Scalia barked that VRA is the “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” less than half a mile away, the Rosa Parks Statue was unveiled at the Capital Building in honor of Park’s activism that ignited the Civil Rights Movement. The same building that was built by African slaves. Yesterday was also the 71st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s upholding the 19th amendment that protected the right to vote for women. What a strange and poetic irony of a day was February 27, 2013; a normal day in American life, proof of our complicate history ...

We live in strange times. Yesterday, as Zerlina has discussed, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And while Scalia barked that VRA is the “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” ...

Today is the first day of February. That means the start of Black History Month… and an occasion for predictable but still infuriating racism.

Running Chicken has compiled some of the many, many tweets out there today insisting that the ever-oppressed white majority must be honored as well. A common trend is the preemptively defensive insistence that their tweets aren’t racist. Any statement to the effect of “I’m not a bigot, but…” is generally good evidence that you are.

Today, I combed the Internets for a video/visual that could really capture some of what Black History month means to me and I found this moving video presentation on ordinary black women:

When you sift through, you definitely will see the greats that your kid sibling is probably learning about: Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, members of the Little Rock Nine, Emmet Till and his mother, Angela Davis, Shirley Chisolm, and Sojourner Truth. But the beauty of this video is the way it captures the everyday black women who labored in cotton fields, homes, railroads, factories, and in many industries that were central to making this country what it is today. But Black women weren’t just ...

Today, I combed the Internets for a video/visual that could really capture some of what Black History month means to me and I found this moving video presentation on ordinary black women: